The Sniper

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From Tom Paine to William Lloyd Garrison, from William Jennings Bryan to Henry Wallace, American ideologues have been a humorless lot. In their devotion to a special set of principles, they have rarely cultivated the art of laughter--especially at themselves. It is perhaps symptomatic of the times that today's leading U.S. ideologue of the right is celebrated for his wit. At 42, William F. Buckley Jr. is that contradiction in terms, a popular polemicist.

Daily, Bill Buckley stands at some conservative Armageddon, but not as the leader of an army or even a division. Barry Goldwater's sobersided conservatives don't understand him; Robert Welch's conspiratorial John Birchers don't trust him. He may not be able to help it, but he is too clever, too humorous, too well read, too (in the current all-purpose adjective of the liberal Establishment) "attractive." He is a solitary sniper, taking skillful shots at the Great Society, at peaceful coexisters, at the heirs and assigns of John F. Kennedy, at Lindsay-woolsey Republicans. Sometimes even an enemy smiles as Buckley hits the mark; sometimes his own rhetorical smoke screen obscures the target. Yet he never tires of the battle. Or is it sport?

The Buckley substance is forgiven for the Buckley style. "He is as brilliant an adversary as he is bankrupt an advocate," says Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. To M.I.T. Political Science Professor Lincoln P. Bloomfield, "he is an exceedingly witty, attractive and rather insidious spokesman for a point of view for which I have few sympathies. But if we don't want to die of sheer boredom, the Buckleys should be encouraged." Buckley offers his own well-considered self-analysis: "I feel I qualify spiritually and philosophically as a conservative, but temperamentally I am not of the breed."

Lifted Eyebrow. Buckley is everywhere in evidence these days. He writes a thrice-weekly column, "On the Right," that is carried by 205 papers. If an editor decides he needs a conservative for proper balance on the editorial page, he turns to Buckley. "He makes other conservative columnists look like guys with grey hair and dandruff," says Atlanta Journal Editor Jack Spalding. Buckley also publishes National Review, a fortnightly magazine of opinion (circ. 94,000) that manages to make conservative thought easy to read and even--at times--entertaining.

He shows off his forensic marksmanship in a weekly TV debate called Firing Line, on which he confronts his adversaries with a polysyllabic vocabulary and an arsenal of intimidating grimaces. Does the occasion call for an eyebrow lifted in disdain, a mouth drawn down in disbelief, a popeyed leer of triumph at a point well scored? Buckley performs on cue. At a time when most TV performers play down to their audience, Buckley remains Buckley, and his program is all the more engaging for it.

When he is confronting a Firing Line adversary, Buckley's secret is surprise, plus the ability to maneuver his opponent into vulnerable positions. He often hoists the man with the petard of his own argument. When Yale's Marxist-minded Professor Staughton Lynd told Buckley that he had made a trip to Hanoi to clarify Ho Chi Minh's peace terms, Buckley shot back: "Surely, as a Marxist, you don't seriously believe that your little vacation to Hanoi would have midwifed some sort of a dialectical reconciliation which would not otherwise have taken place? Surely Hanoi isn't dependent upon Yale's vacation schedule for deciding how to press its foreign policy?" Or Buckley may carry an opponent's line of reasoning one step further and make it look ridiculous. On Firing Line, TV Star Robert Vaughn started naming the people he thought had conspired to commit the U.S. to the defense of Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in South Viet Nam. "Joseph Buttinger, General Edward Lansdale, Wesley Fishel, Cardinal Spellman . ." Buckley broke in: "And the Holy Ghost?" With these tactics, Buckley often reduces his adversaries to nonverbal floundering. Novelist Nelson Algren simply gave up talking and started singing. "I want to turn you on, Bill," said Timothy Leary. "I want to get you to drop out."

Not everyone is willing to do battle with Buckley on his turf. Buckley was anxious to match wits with Senator Robert Kennedy on Firing Line, offered him $500 and a role in planning the format. But Bobby was not about to rise to that tempting bale. He sent word back through an aide that he would rather not. Asked why he thought Kennedy had turned him down, Buckley replied: "Why does baloney reject the grinder?"

Violently Inflamed. Buckley has a fondness for far-out analogy. Last spring, when John Kenneth Galbraith appeared at a picket line of striking television employees in order to show that he would not cross it, Buckley wrote in his column: "It was a nostalgic demonstration of an old faith, rather as if Marlene Dietrich, emulating the Victorian ladies of yesteryear, were to faint upon hearing an obscenity." Buckley summed up the attitude of Texas Republicans facing the approaching presidential election: "The dilemma is how to be, at once, both a winner and a Republican. That is the lot of the woman, as La Rochefoucauld observed, who is at once inflexibly virtuous and violently inflamed." Listing possible Republican tickets, Buckley offered his own preference--with reservations. "Reagan, Javits--with perhaps the explicit understanding that if President Reagan were to die in office, Vice President Javits would hurl himself upon the funeral pyre in grief."

Fever Swamps. Buckley can be effectively pithy. When the British Labor government decided to equip police with breathometers to check drivers for drunkenness, he commented: "People are beginning to wish that the voters had been given breathometer tests when they voted in the present government." Or he can set sail on splendid seas of invective. "The Bishop of Woolwich, who is England's Bishop Pike only more so, announced recently from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral that he had recently traveled to America and there found that 'every Christian I met' was opposed to the war in Viet Nam--a statement which, if true, suggests that the bishop was given a Potemkin tour of the U.S., visiting only the fever swamps of the Christian left; or, and this is more likely and more charitable, that the bishop does not know a Christian when he sees one, even as, one must conclude on reading his books, he does not recognize Christianity when he sees it."

Buckley's enemies bring out the best in him. He is less interesting when he starts singing the praises of his friends such as Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, Everett Dirksen ("moving through the crowd like the eye of a hurricane, an oasis of calmness"), Walter Judd ("Is there anywhere a more impressive American?"). Of all of Buckley's hang-ups, two of the worst have been Moise Tshombe, whom Buckley thought the U.S. sold out, and Senator Thomas Dodd, whom Buckley thought the Senate sold short. "I, for one, announce," he inaccurately predicted, "the beginning of a very long period of bitterness against the gang of flagitious moralizers who conspired against a brave and simple man of distinguished public record and found him guilty by bill of attainder."

Sometimes Buckley caters to the repressive streak common to many U.S. conservatives. During his campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, he gave a speech to the police telling them how much they had been maligned by the press. Heavily criticized for his jocular references to questionable police practices, he did not back down a bit. "The police can't use clubs or gas or dogs," he said testily. "I suppose they will have to use poison ivy."

Idea Broker. Buckley is a gifted polemicist; a philosopher he is not. A friend of his and a fellow conservative, M. Stanton Evans, editor of the Indianapolis News, thinks he could be if he put his mind to it. "But he has left the metaphysics to others," says Evans. "He has concentrated instead on a high-level conservative journalism, acting as a broker and analyst of ideas rather than as an originator of them." Buckley is not interested in lingering long over any one idea. Rather, he tosses them out, shoots them down, then goes off to stalk others without leaving many traces behind. His hearers or readers are momentarily stunned, surprised, even awed. But later they often have a hard time recalling just what it was he said.

He is even less of a political pragmatist. He apparently fails to appreciate the intuitive genius of the accomplished politician. He was outraged when people began to talk about John Lindsay for President after his walks through Harlem helped prevent riots last summer. Buckley wanted to know how this equipped him for the presidency: "Is the Secretary of State properly engaged in walking up and down the Biafran frontier, grinning and winking at the disputants? Would he then rush off to Wuhan, there to quiet the impulses of the Red Guards?"

Second Avenue Bikeway. Nowhere was Buckley's lack of realism as a politician better demonstrated than in his madcap race for mayor. It was never exactly clear why he was doing it. He knew he didn't have a prayer of winning. When a reporter asked him what he would do if elected, he quipped, "I'd demand a recount." One of his aims was to spoil John Lindsay's chances: to Buckley, nothing is more reprehensible than a liberal Republican, because he has diluted conservative doctrine. His politics largely formed by the neat formulations of books rather than by the messy maneuverings of everyday life, Buckley would like to see a clear-cut ideological division between the two parties: all the conservatives in the Republican Party, all the liberals in the Democratic. Today's unwieldy, ideologically impure parties, somehow absorbing all sorts of seemingly incompatible groups, profoundly offend him. As Barry Goldwater told him: "As a political kingmaker, you're a wrong-way Corrigan."

Because he misunderstands the fluid nature of U.S. party politics, Buckley probably helped Lindsay win. He siphoned off many conservative Democratic votes that otherwise would have gone to Abe Beame; he scared many liberal Democrats into voting for Lindsay. In the campaign, however, he momentarily fascinated many liberals with some thoughtful proposals (a heavy inbound toll on Manhattan bridges and tunnels to reduce traffic into the city), some antic ones (building an overhead bikeway down Second Avenue so that New Yorkers could improve their muscle tone), and almost total political candor. Even that well-known liberal Groucho Marx said that if he were a New Yorker, he'd vote for Buckley. And he wasn't kidding.

Hyperbolic Tradition. It took liberals a long time to appreciate Buckley. His public encounters at first tended to be nasty, brutish and short. After Buckley appeared on his show, Jack Paar told the TV audience that Buckley had "no humanity." Buckley described David Susskind as the most deserving candidate for the "title of Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt." Susskind retaliated on camera by ridiculing Buckley's mannerisms and calling them "symptoms of psychotic paranoia." Buckley did not add to his popularity by co-authoring a book called McCarthy and His Enemies with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell. Charge by charge, Buckley and Bozell examined McCarthy's accusations and found them largely warranted. Buckley is still defensive about the book. "There is a hyperbolic tradition in American politics," he says, "and suddenly everyone expected McCarthy to be very fastidious."

But the McCarthy era has receded, the radical right is at least temporarily in eclipse, and people are worried about the violence-prone New Left. Buckley does not seem as menacing as he once did. Today, he can truthfully say that some of his best friends are liberals. Namely, Galbraith, Columnist Murray Kempton, Norman Mailer and Steve Allen, whom Buckley once introduced on Firing Line prior to a debate on capital punishment: "My own thinking on the subject is confused, which, come to think of it, should make Steve Allen feel quite at home." Some people have a sneaking suspicion, in fact, that Buckley prefers the company of liberals, who, even if they disagree with him, talk his language. Buckley once went skiing with Galbraith, whose Keynesian economics is anathema to him. Noting the economist's awkward form on the slopes, Buckley asked him how long he had been skiing. "Thirty years," replied Galbraith. "Mmm," said Buckley, "the same length of time you've been studying economics."

Matter of Course. To their surprise, some of those who resent his arrogant manners on TV find Buckley ingratiating in private. To Clare Boothe Luce, who knows him well, he is "that rare thing: a very opinionated man who listens very courteously to the other fellow." Uninitiates, who tend to approach him socially with the wariness of a bunny facing a boa constrictor, are often pleasantly relieved when they are not swallowed whole. Buckley punctuates his conversation with the phrase "That was fun," or "That was great fun." His ready smile exposes what he calls a "disconcerting sea of teeth." For an ideologue, he has more than a passing fancy for the luxuries of life, often piles his wife Patricia and their only child, Christopher, 15, into their 40-ft. yawl, where they embark on a four-course French meal served at sea.

Buckley is in vogue as never before. He is asked to write nonideological articles for nonconservative publications. He has just finished a piece for Esquire on Truman Capote's masked ball, to which he was invited as a matter of course. He and Pat appeared on the cover of a recent issue of Town & Country. His letters are printed wherever he chooses to write them. After the London Observer ran an article declaring that the U.S. had become the center of homosexual activity, it printed a Buckley letter suggesting that the reason might be the "brain drain." This month Buckley starts teaching a course at Manhattan's New School for Social Research on the relevance of conservative principles to urban problems.

He stands in grave danger, in fact, of being adopted by the liberal establishment he deplores. On Firing Line, Richard Goodwin, a former speechwriter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, gave Buckley the stamp of approval of the Great Society. "Any society, and particularly the Great Society," intoned Goodwin, "needs a responsible force on the right. I think that all of us are very glad that you are that force. It might have been somebody who is mean and sharp and nasty and unwilling to debate the issues. As long as you're there, it protects the civilities of discourse in a free society." Replied a startled Buckley: "I'm going to dissolve at this rate. I'm not used to being treated so kindly."

Pernicious Foreigner. Buckley's conservatism is very much a family affair. His father, William Frank Buckley Sr., who made millions in oil in Mexico and later in Venezuela, was understandably devoted to unfettered free enterprise. His mother, Aloise, was from a deep-rooted family of New Orleans, where she acquired a distinct distaste for importunate Yankees and their progressive ideas. The family conservatism was, if anything, strengthened when the elder Buckley was thrown out of Mexico as a "pernicious foreigner" in 1921 and his holdings expropriated. "It gave him," says his daughter Priscilla, "a lifelong distrust of revolutionary and socialist governments."

This distrust he successfully communicated to his ten children, not one of whom ever deviated from the conservative faith of the father or from his staunch Roman Catholicism. "Perhaps the reason we did not rebel," thinks Buckley, "is that Father was a dissenter all his life. Had he been an establishmentarian, there might have been a greater impulse to rebel." In the influence that he exercised over his brood, until his death in 1958 at 77, Buckley Sr. bore considerable resemblance to that other patriarch of Irish descent, Joseph P. Kennedy. But beyond the Irishness, the Buckleys do not own up to any similarities. "My greatest accomplishment is not having one single child who has been a failure," says Aloise Buckley. Yet personal ambition may not have been so vigorously instilled in them as in the Kennedys. "Our family plays touch football too," says Bill, "but not so ferociously."

Buckley Sr. subjected his children to a rigorous, if haphazard education. Unimpressed by the schools as he moved from Venezuela to France to England and back to the U.S. (Sharon, Conn., where Mrs. Buckley Sr. still lives), he stressed education at home. Not the kind of businessman who sneered at the liberal arts, he hired tutors in dance, architecture, painting, herb gardening, and one who was expert at building boats inside bottles. "We thought we had tried about everything," recalls Bill, "and in would come yet another professor." All the children were trilingual, or at least bilingual. Bill learned to speak Spanish and French along with English. He also learned to play the piano and--as his detractors are fond of emphasizing--that reactionary instrument, the clavichord.

Buckley pere revered, above all, the English language. "Father was always a language purist," says Buckley. "Bad grammar was for him like dirt under the fingernail." Buckley developed his father's respect for words, and used them freely, furiously and all too literally. While attending Millbrook School in New York, he appeared uninvited at a faculty meeting and proceeded to complain about his teachers' politics--too liberal, of course. Even his father felt constrained to admonish him: "I like very much your attitude of having strong convictions, but you will have to learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views and to express them in a way that would give as little offense as possible to your friends." That was about the only piece of advice from his father that Buckley managed to ignore.

Shocked Administration. After graduating from Millbrook at the head of his class, Bill studied briefly at the University of Mexico, then was drafted into the Army in 1944. Assigned to intelligence work along the Mexican border, he arrived the day the Japanese surrendered, and spent most of his time lecturing Mexican-American recruits on personal hygiene. After his discharge, he went to Yale, where he taught Spanish and toured with the debating team. Very large on campus (Torch Honor Society, Fence Club, Elizabethan Club, Skull and Bones), he became chairman of the Yale Daily News in his junior year and used its editorial column to disseminate his heterodox views.

Chosen class orator for alumni day 1950, Buckley submitted a speech rebuking the university for its aimless liberalism and lack of a sense of mission. It was turned down by a shocked administration. "They all figured I was a bright, facile guy who just didn't understand," says Buckley. "So, en passant, I mentioned it to a publisher. He was patronizing, but liked my brashness and said go ahead." In July 1950, Buckley married a Vassar Girl, Pat Taylor; in September, after a "hedonistic summer," he sat down and "batted out" God and Man at Yale.

God and Man rocked the Yale campus--and the world beyond. Buckley debunked "academic freedom" as a screen behind which the faculty was indoctrinating gullible students in liberalism and atheism; he even named the offending professors and exposed what he supposed to be their brainwashing techniques. The liberal academic establishment rose in wrath against this upstart. "As a believer in God, a Republican, and a Yale graduate," wrote McGeorge Bundy at the time, "I find that the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author."

Professors on several campuses challenged Buckley to open debate--only to find, to their consternation, that the boy could talk as well as he could write. He left behind him some badly bloodied academic reputations. Taking the cue from Brother, Sister Patricia wrote a magazine article criticizing Vassar for being too leftist; another sister, Aloise, uncovered some "Communists" on the Smith campus and urged the alumnae to stop contributing to the college until the matter was investigated. Unlike the Yalies, however, the Smithies could not have cared less.

United Hostility. Many a bright young undergraduate sets the world ablaze with a precocious book only to see it flicker out in a year or two, and nothing is heard from him again. Buckley has fed the flames and avoided obscurity because he had the sustained drive--and also the money. Thanks to $125,000 from the family plus $300,000 he raised elsewhere, he was able to start National Review in 1955, a publication that provided him with a voice. It also served as a rallying point for other conservatives. To Review came Russell Kirk and Frank S. Meyer, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. From the outset, they quarreled snappishly on its pages. Traditionalists like Kirk, who value society over the individual, battled libertarians like Meyer, who emphasize the individual over society. "I pretty much had to insist on the relevance of both points of view," says Buckley, who made it his business to keep the fractious conservatives from splitting completely.

They could all unite, however, in their hostility to Communism. Some, like Burnham and Meyer, had been Communists and understood the viciousness of the creed--nor have they forgotten or forgiven. If there has been a thaw in the Soviet Union, there is no way of telling from the Review. The publication denounces the nuclear test-ban treaty as a sellout to the Russians; Burnham writes a column on foreign affairs called "The Third World War"--the Review has no doubt that it has begun. Not long ago, Buckley urged the U.S. to bomb China's nuclear installations--once due warning had been given so that civilians could be evacuated.

Eviscerating Birchers. National Review preaches mainly to the converted; it has a way of repeating itself without offering many new ideas. It does bring off a certain humor each issue--a quality that recommends it to readers who are otherwise appalled by its politics. The liveliest section of the magazine, "The Week," consists of random notes, arch and wry, on a variety of consequential and not so consequential topics.

Because Review tries to avoid what Buckley calls "extreme apriorism," it has parted company with some dogmatic conservatives. "Objectivist" Ayn Rand, who believes that all human activity should be self-serving, refuses even to appear in the same room with Buckley because the Review panned her novel Atlas Shrugged. Max Eastman resigned, with barbs on both sides, after he accused Buckley of tying conservatism too closely to religion.

Angriest of all are the John Birchers, whose leader, Robert Welch, was eviscerated by Buckley in a series of articles. As a result, even though Buckley works are still carried in Birch bookshops, Buckley now receives much more hate mail from the far right than the far left. A wall of his office in Review's midtown Manhattan building is papered with nasty letters. "Buckley's articles cost the Birchers their respectability with conservatives," says Richard Nixon. "I couldn't have accomplished that. Liberals couldn't have, either."

For all its championing of free enterprise, National Review gets precious few ads. The captains of industry that it celebrates are reluctant to return the favor, largely because the magazine does not reach enough readers to suit them; profits take precedence over ideology. Besides, Buckley is not a totally reliable supporter. In one breathtaking column for the Review, he managed to equate Henry Ford's divorce with the suicides of Publisher Philip Graham and Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler's keeper. All were men, wrote Buckley "wanting in the stuff of spiritual survival." Ford yanked its advertising. BOAC, on the other hand, is one of the Review's most faithful advertisers. Muses Buckley: "Maybe only a state-owned airline can afford to advertise in National Review."

To relieve the magazine's annual deficit of $200,000 or so, Buckley contributes his own substantial earnings from his column, from Firing Line, and from his lectures (fee per appearance: $1,000). Nevertheless, every year he has to warn of the magazine's imminent extinction unless contributions are forthcoming. The latest appeal, last June, brought 2,000 contributions, enough to make up the loss.

Art of Maneuver. During the years he has edited the Review, Buckley's own views have remained consistently conservative; few people are permitted to influence his thought. One who did was Whittaker Chambers, who added some warmth and humanity to Buckley's bookish conservatism. Chambers, says Buckley, "was an anti-theory man, a poet--not an exegete." A line he once wrote to Buckley is engraved on his memory: "To live is to maneuver." And despite his devotion to conservatism, Buckley has learned to maneuver. He has urged his fellow Roman Catholics to moderate their hostility toward birth control and abortion, thereby alienating Brother-in-Law Bozell, who publishes the conservative Catholic magazine Triumph. Believing in the innocence of Edgar Smith, a convicted rapist now in the death house in Trenton, Buckley has done his level best to win him a retrial. In recent columns, he has come out in favor of L.BJ.'s rent-supplement program, compulsory arbitration of major labor disputes, and "massive" aid to the ghettos--scarcely traditional conservative causes.

Though he resists suggestions that he has become a liberal in any sense, Buckley admits to being "less insistent on rhetorical purity than I was a few years back. It's one thing to complain that Government has got into a situation. It's another to keep repeating it all your life. In an ideal society, I'd be against compulsory arbitration; yet I think people are a bore who create a theology around private enterprise." It has been a firm conservative tenet that the state must be kept as limited as possible. Yet that belief has run smack into the conservative demand to fight the cold war as vigorously as possible. "Today, as never before," concedes Buckley, "the state is the necessary instrument of our proximate deliverance."

Picking Up Aperc,us. Some of the programs advanced by Buckley are being freshly scrutinized by liberals who have become disillusioned with some of their own panaceas. Many agree with Buckley that initiative in social progress lies as much with local government as with federal. Like him, they are unhappy with the massive dislocations caused by such federal superprograms as highway construction and urban renewal. When Bobby Kennedy recently urged private industry to help rebuild the ghettos, Buckley congratulated him for a "statement so sensible that it made recommendations I made three years ago." Buckley, in fact, is a bit chagrined that it is liberal Democrats and not conservative Republicans who have been making some dramatic proposals along conservative lines. "The other side," he told Richard Nixon on Firing Line, "is picking up an essentialy conservative aperc,u and running off with it."

Some of Buckley's admirers feel that he has spread himself too thin, that he has dissipated his energies in too many ephemeral enterprises. "I'm not sure what I would have done with my energies if I hadn't dissipated them," says Buckley. "Would the world have been better off if I had written more books instead of columns?" Besides, he adds, "I reproach myself more than they do when I think of all the sailing I might have done." The sum total of his activities has nevertheless left its mark. He has certainly given conservatism a sheen of articulateness and thoughtfulness it has not always had. "The average American," says Ohio Congressman John M. Ashbrook, "thinks that conservatives are dour, always griping and clipping coupons. Bill puts down that notion."

Buckley himself feels that the U.S. may be moving--at a snail's pace, to be sure--toward his kind of society. This is the point he makes in a book he is writing: The Revolt Against the Masses, a sequel to Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses. To Ortega's somber message that the mass mind has displaced the aristocratic ideal, Buckley replies that there are signs of a resurgence of that ideal--in the movement away from behaviorism, from the "extreme pretensions of democratism." If Buckley foresees a conservative society emerging, however, he is probably in for a disappointment.

Despite the adoption of certain programs that might be considered conservative, the U.S. public is unlikely to swerve from its liberal course no matter how much a solitary Buckley may prod. But the fun is in the prodding, as far as William Buckley is concerned. And if, through fire, flood, earthquake, atomic holocaust or even conservatism, the present-day liberal U.S. should expire, no one stands to lose more than Buckley. For he enjoys the best of both worlds: a society that is especially vulnerable to criticism from the right and equally willing to take it.

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